Yeah, the fat kid was Augustus Gloop.
In fourth or fifth grade I was Bill Clinton in the play about the presidents. It was a gender neutral role I guess, since all the presidents were guys, and there were guys and girls in the class. I only got that because I had a better memory than everyone else and I memorized the whole speech for auditions and other people had to read it off the sheet. I also got Andrew Jackson in the same play.
In first grade I was a daisy. We all wore green shirts, pants and socks, and had a headress of yellow petals that flared out around our face. I am glad no pictures exist. No lines, all the daisies did was sway back and forth when the wind fairies(snicker) would run among us.
Veruca Salt is the character. Can’t remember the exact name of the band.
Mon Dieu, that’s rather similar to my elementary school Shakespeare list.
It pays to have an older sister in the same school as you; when they need a small person for a play, you get volunteered. And then when they keep needing small people, you get called back.
2nd grade - Luce in Comedy of Errors (older sister was Dromeo of Syracuse.)
3rd grade - Luce in Comedy of Errors (the class had two sets of identical twins, so same show again.)
4th grade - Chickweed (extra fairy) in Midsummer Night’s Dream
5th grade - 1/3 of Ceres, Ariel understudy in The Tempest
6th grade - Hortensio in Taming of the Shrew (damn class voting on the casting…)
Also, Pronoun She in “Tracers of the Lost Parts of Speech” and “Prince John” in Robin Hood (got applause for my audition - sweet moment.) Elementary school, my last diva days.
In fifth grade my whole wing put on some travesty entitled KIDS: The Musical. The different scenes involved some kid whose dad didnt’ live with him, but the kid wanted his dad to call (sad sad sad… :rolleyes: at least that was the IDEA, but it didn’t turn out that way), two kids who are camping with different groups of friends, each has a crush on the other but doesn’t know the other likes them back, some little kid who saw monsters, and a bunch of others I don’t remember. My skit, in which I had a major part as Voice, was about somebody getting arrested and taken to court for having an imagination. I had a song solo and everything. That was the last time I was ever on stage as a solo performer (I don’t count chorus concerts).
What I remember of my song:
Typical of that musical.
I’ve worked stage crew for two high school musical productions: Guys and Dolls and The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know what they’ll be doing this year, but I’ll be crew again. I auditioned last year, but got cut ebcause I sang a song I’d written for my audition instead of doing a Broadway show tune. :rolleyes:
I wasn’t in a play in elementary school, but was an extra in a skit put on in summer camp, before I reached 5th grade. The scene: a bank robbery. Like others on stage, I raised my hands and wobbled my knees. :o I also wrote a line for the skit–someone else used it in the scene:
“Don’t shoot! I have 30,000 kids and a wife at home!”
BWAHAHAHAHAHA :D:D
I didn’t realize at the time how big thirty thousand is.
Got to play Mr. Pipgrass in Dobie Gillis as a high-school senior. He was the kind of character who winced whenever someone else committed a grammatical fault. Perhaps he was a prototype for Sgt. Dietrich of Barney Miller, or Cliff Clavin of Cheers.
Another character was “Limbo Lamb,” played by a girl I knew who was–and still is–a knockout. 
She and I were adversaries in the story–in fact, Limbo didn’t have any friends! The script called for her character to change clothes in a room offstage, and for my character to go into the room innocently. Then: “A moment later there is a loud scream, and MR. PIPGRASS storms in off R.”
This scream got a good laugh from the audience. (The girl and I were, and are, friends.)
Elementary in the choir I was. High school different, judge of play festival in play I am. Competition was the name.
In third grade I was christopher columbus, I was one of the brightest kids in class and could read the lines better so I guess the gender thing didn’t matter.
In 4th grade I was Levi Strauss, same deal as above.
4th grade christmas play I was Little Red Ridding Hood, finally! I was almost of the verge of an identity crisis.
7th grade I played lots of minor roles, one of the spice girls, Scary I think, Cocoa Puff, a dog in a play that I wrote, I’m STILL bitter about the drama teacher messing up my death and rebirth scenes.
8th grade was my only major role, I was the wicked witch of the west from the Wizard of Oz. Eppe Pepe Kaki Laki! Hillo Hollo Halo Hello! Zizzy Zuzzy Zick! What kind of magic spell is that? And to top it all off I had to jump from foot to foot, but I got to whip the lion so I was happy.
9th grade I was a “shadow” Benvolio, I had one monologue so the other Benvolio would’nt have to memorize it for our scene. I REALLY wanted to be Mercutio because my group got his dying scene, heck, I know most of the lines anyway I love that play, but the teacher wouldn’t let me be a guy. sigh
Drama Kitty
The name of the band is, ironically, Veruca Salt. :rolleyes:
I am almost too embarassed to admit it, but y’all don’t know anything else about me anyway. I was “Captain Casey” in our school’s production of “Cabbage Patch Dreams.” Whatever (presumably adult) person decided to create a play based on Cabbage Patch Kids and then make the lead character a male part is inherently evil.
I was picked as the lead not for singing or dancing ability, but because the part was lead and narrator, and had to remember a lot of lines. And the sad thing is, I still (13 years later) can remember 10-20% of the words from the songs. Including the fact that, when I was nine, I could hit a high F (above high C).
My mother still has the video of the production, but I keep looking for ways to get it away from her and ritually sacrifice it.
LL
I was in Johnny Appleseed.
The classroom scene.
I had one line: “No, two times four is twenty-four!”
Scarred me for life.
In kindergarden I was in a play about diversity where we all stood in line and one by one we dropped things into a “melting pot”. We each had a line or two explaining what our ingredient to the melting pot was. Unfortunately I can’t remember what mine was. I do remember part of the song we sang:
“Everything is beautiful in its own way.
<a list of colors (ie black, white, red, yellow) and something that rhymes with way>”
In junior high, I was a servant in a play about the Egyptian creation mtyh. I remember retrieving some god’s bones from a river so that some other god could bring him back to life.
I was also the mirror in our jr. high Snow White play.
I was some sort of a priest/narrator in some play for the school Christmas show back in some early grade . . . my memory sucks. I do remember the guy running the spotlight tried to blind me on several occasions, though.
That’s the only grade school play I was ever in. In fact, that’s the only speaking part I’ve had in any play in any school since then. I usually help with set construction nowadays (why is it the only person who knows jack s*** about building winds up designing the set? I wouldn’t STAND on some of the stuff we built, much less do a pratfall on it).
I’ve also run the lights on a couple occasions. That’s always fun . . . like the time I got a few of my friends to sit in the box with me and we spent the whole play making up new lines for the actors, pretending to be John Wilkes Booth shooting the light man by mistake . . . “Sorry sir, I thought you were the President.” That sort of thing.
– Zilch
8th grade play - in an adaptation of “Around the World in 80 Days,” I had a few lines as Dunstan, a member of Phileas Fogg’s club.
HS senior play - in “The Music Man,” Marcellus (Buddy Hackett role in movie)
I was much cooler than all of you[sup]*[/sup]. I got to be Gengis Khan.
[sup]*possible exceptions: Inky, Fairy Princess Kitty :p[/sup]
The first play I was in was in 4th grade. We did the Wizard of Oz. I was a munchkin.
At the time, I was one of the tallest kids in the grade. (This is what happens when you start puberty at 9.) I was a head taller than almost all of the other kids in the play.
Did I mention that I’m 5’3? No, not bitter at all…
I was Pangloss. I forget the name of the play, but it was a one-scene children’s musical based on Voltaire’s Candide.
Sounds weird, and so was the teacher.
I only remember being in two plays, both in the fifth grade. In the first play, it was basically about the history of the Constitution. The whole class stood on bleachers and recited our lines. No moving around or costumes or anything. I remember being really pissed because I had the least amount of lines out of everybody. I only had two lines and my character was supposed to be, get this, a black slave during the Civil War. Here I am, this short, skinny, very pale, white blonde hair, bright blue eyes little girl, trying my best to imitate a Jim Crow accent. The whole audience laughed loudly, and this play was not supposed to be a comedy (they were not laughing with me, they were laughing at me…how humiliating).
The next play was about the dangers of drinking and drugs. In this play, we had a set that looked like your average living room. In the story, one kid spikes the punch with some kind of liquid and the kids drink it and then we all passed out on the stage and had to lay there for pretty much the rest of the play. I only had one line, something like “why does this taste funny?”, then all I had to do was slump over onto the nearest chair. Of course, I missed the chair, fell on the floor and slammed my head on the stage really hard. Again, great big laughs from the audience, who assumed I had done it on purpose.
That was the end of my performing days, except for the choir concerts in seventh grade (I was always in the chorus, never got the solo)
My onstage career peaked in kindergarten, when I had the title role in “The Whispering Bunny Rabbit”, about a rabbit who swallows a bee and is unable to talk above a whisper for most of the rest of the play. The uncharitable view of this would be that they didn’t want me trying to talk for most of the play, while the positive spin would be that I was the best actor in the bunch and could convey the essence of the role non-verbally. Anyway, I did get to talk at the end after the fairy successfully extracted the bee, after all the other forest animals failed in their attempts to do so.
I’m sure I had parts in other class plays in elementary school, but I don’t remember any of them. I recall writing and directing a version of “The Bremen Town Musicians” for an in-class project in third or fourth grade. Also in fourth grade, a friend of mine and I were selected as the PA system operators, which meant that we got to skip class to help all of the other classes rehearse and perform their plays (amounting to plugging in the mics, turning on the PA system, and turning the lights on and off). We spent most of the time playing football with wadded-up paper balls in the choir room behind the stage.
For some reason, I usually got called on to recite the 23rd Psalm before each assembly. I’ve always had a facility for memorization and was reasonably articulate, and I was always available since I was operating the lights and PA. Gives me the creeps to think about now, since this was a public school, but in a small Arkansas town in the early 70s it seemed logical and natural enough.
Skipped out completely on theatre stuff in junior high and high school. Did a couple of theatre production and playwriting courses in college, and did lights and sound solo for a Sam Shepard one act that had so many sound cues I had to bring extra equipment into our state of the art theater.
In the first and fourth grade musicals, I was in the chorus. But in fifth grade their was some mini-play we did–open to just 5th grade, and the audience was just 5th grade and their families–where I was the lead. I have no idea what the play was or even any characteristics about my character, except she was a girl. And I was her. Yeah, that apparently had a huge effect on my life. :rolleyes:
Heh, when I was in grade school, for some reason, my biggest fear was… “The Christmas Pageant”. The idea of getting up on stage and singing was the single most frightening thing to my poor little brain at the time! Every year without fail, I’d be sick the day of the pageant. My parents (both teachers) would tell their principal the day of the pageant “Our daughter’s school will be calling, saying she has a fever and needs to come home” and without fail, I would run a fever and go home!
I think fifth grade was the first time I was ever in anything, and I got stuck being “A Partridge in a Pear Tree” with Nathan Jones. We had to hold a card with a picture of a partridge and sing BY OURSELVES. No idea how I survived that. But I later joined chorus and glee club, and was “The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come” in high school, where I somehow managed to run from the back of the theatre, leap onto the stage and over a couch and say my lines, all without taking a breath! Almost passed out when I was done.
Aah, memories…